Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Sales Management That Works, Aligning Strategy and Sales, as well as other books and articles.
When it comes to business, we talk too much about social media and expect too little. It’s like the old joke about sales people: one person says, “I made some valuable contacts today,” and the other responds, “I didn’t get any orders, either.” Companies measure the...
If you have a monopoly, then your reward is a quiet life, one devoid of having to deal with competition. But most firms face changing competition, threats to their installed base, and quarterly investor expectations — all of which place sometimes conflicting demands...
The goal of strategy is sustained profitable growth, and that means earning returns above your cost of capital or what economists call “Economic Profit” (EP). Companies seeking profitable growth, therefore, face two interdependent tasks: grow the top line and manage...
What does it take to be a good salesperson? There’s a wide range of responses. Most reflect what you’d expect to find in the Boy Scout Handbook, with commonly cited traits like modesty, listening, curiosity, achievement orientation, and lack of discouragement. In pop...
The gap between a company’s sales and strategy are important now more than ever. While we may or may not be recovering from a lengthly recession, it has been a slippery slope towards recovery for many years. The average S&P company decreased its COGS by over 250...
Marketing Book of the Year is an organisation of M&SB and selects the best global Marketing Book of The Year 2014 from the world wide offer in the last year. See the nominated books.
Any strategy lives or dies on the basis of its customer value proposition. There are many typologies relevant to crafting a value proposition, because there are many ways to win customers. But the key issue is always: what is the center-of-gravity in our approach? Do...
There’s no question that the corporate marketing function is evolving rapidly to become one of the most strategic functions in the enterprise. And that means the makeup of the marketing teams that leading CMOs must assemble is also undergoing a rapid transformation....
Companies typically spend more hiring their sales forces than any other function in an organization, yet sales managers often aren’t adept at assessing the right skills to make good hires. It’s time to turn that around in order to drive better bottom-line results. If...
In the preface to Aligning Strategy and Sales, Frank Cespedes writes; "Selling is, by far, the most expensive part of implementation for most firms... The amount invested in sales forces (including salaries, benefits, and other components of SG&A -- selling,...
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